(LA Times) According to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ), the arrest rate for all offenses in California sank by 40% from 1990 to 2008, with arrests for rape and murder falling by more than 60% each. Drug possession arrests for everything but marijuana collectively fell by nearly 30% in the same period. Meanwhile, arrests for marijuana possession have skyrocketed — up 127%. This rise in marijuana arrests is the ultimate outlier.

California made a major step toward decriminalizing low-level pot possession in 1975, when it made possession of less than an ounce a misdemeanor punishable with a fine and no jail time. That didn’t stop law enforcement from arresting more than 74,000 people last year — the highest number since the 1975 law took effect. More than 80% of those arrests were for misdemeanor possession, the lowest-level offense.

Not surprisingly, given the way drug laws are traditionally enforced in this country, the burden has fallen disproportionately on people of color, and on young black men in particular. According to the CJCJ, half of California’s marijuana possession arrestees were nonwhite in 1990 and 28% were under age 20. Last year, 62% were nonwhite and 42% were under age 20. Marijuana possession arrests of youth of color rose from about 3,100 in 1990 to about 16,300 in 2008 — an arrest surge 300% greater than the rate of population growth in that group.

Even more disturbing, African Americans account for an even higher portion of all marijuana felony arrests. Blacks make up less than 7% of the state population but 22% of people arrested for all marijuana offenses and 33% of all marijuana felony arrests. More African Americans are arrested in California for marijuana felonies than are whites, even though whites are six times more represented in the state population.

The overrepresentation of African Americans is not explained by use rates. According to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the percentage of African Americans and whites who use marijuana over any 30-day period are similar. However, for the 18-25 age group — which constitutes a substantial proportion of marijuana arrests — African Americans regularly use marijuana at rates lower than whites (16.5% and 18.4%, respectively), indicating that their overrepresentation may be even more profound.

These statistics would be shocking if one wasn’t aware of the roots of marijuana prohibition.  It has always been about harassing and controlling the “undesirable” populations from the moment the first anti-Mexican immigrant pot prohibitions were passed a century ago in El Paso.  The term “marihuana” itself is Mexican slang, used to give the innocuous-sounding hemp plant a more evil-sounding name.  As black jazz musicians popularized marijuana use in the ’20s and ’30s, yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst and first “drug czar” Harry J. Anslinger were quick to leverage racism in their demonization of a plant:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others. … Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” — Harry J. Anslinger, America’s 1st Drug Czar (FDR – JFK)

“Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him…. Marihuana influences Negroes to to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows and look at a white woman twice.” — William Randolph Hearst, Newspaper Tycoon (1936)

Lest you think that kind of talk died out after Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s, check out President Nixon’s rationalization for the War on Drugs, first from the Nixon Tapes, and second as explained to Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman (from Halderman’s diaries):

“I want a Goddamn strong statement on marijuana, I mean one that just tears the ass out of them. You know, it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish…. You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this all while not appearing to.” — Richard M. Nixon, Former US President

Should marijuana be legalized?  Yes.

What impact would it have on African-Americans?  Well, first off, it might mean that not 1-in-3 black men would be under correctional supervision (prison, parole, probation) and there might be more young black men in college than prison.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
April 16, 1963

Today our nation honors what would’ve been this week the eightieth birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of these United States.  I was sixty-four days old when an assassin’s bullet cut down Dr. King in the prime of his life.  Today I am six-hundred forty days older than Dr. King when he was killed.  Tomorrow I will see something few people my age and older thought we’d ever see, yet something Dr. King had dreamed from the start.

There remains a grave injustice to be battled, the most unjust of laws to be disobeyed, a law that by its definition is not rooted in eternal law and natural law: the man made code that declares nature itself to be illegal, the prohibition on cannabis.  Yet when I mention marijuana law reform in the context of the great civil rights struggles in America, so many are quick to dismiss me with snickers of derision.  ”You just want pot legal so you can get high!” is a common refrain.

Marijuana law reform is a civil rights struggle.  I will not attempt to equate this struggle to those of minorities, women, or gays and lesbians; however, there are some parallels among our fight and theirs and, indeed, some threads of drug law injustice are woven directly into the struggles of these groups.  The prohibition of drugs was one of the tools of oppression – the “Negroes” for their cocaine, the “Chinamen” for their opium, and the Mexicans for their marihuana.  It remains so today – while people use drugs at about the same rate regardless of race, African-Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately arrested, convicted, and serve longer sentences for drug use than white people.

Aside from the racist nature of the origins and applications, cannabis prohibition itself is an unjust law.  First consider that it isn’t merely against the law to possess, cultivate, traffic, buy, and consume marijuana – it is against the law to be marijuana.  Federal and state law enforcement spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours flying helicopters attempting to spot cannabis growing out in the wild.  Ninety-eight percent of what is seized is known as “feral hemp”, which is wild ditchweed with unsmokably-low levels of THC.  Officials rip up and destroy every plant they see whether it is owned or tended by any human, whether or not it could possibly intoxicate any human.   Logically, then, the ultimate goal of marijuana prohibition is not to simply stop humans from using it for intoxication, but to eradicate the species cannabis sativa L. from the earth!

Think of that: our official policy is the extinction of a species of life.  Certainly that’s not entirely new.  We’re dedicated to the extinction of all manner of microscopic life, after all, but that is a justifiable policy for self-preservation – we kill bugs that kill us.  I cannot think of another plant or animal we treat like cannabis.  Deadly plants like nightshade and belladonna are legal, annoying plants like poison ivy and poison oak are legal, even intoxicating plants like coca and poppy are legal when cultivated for prescription medications.  But the cannabis plant, the plant that cannot kill you is completely illegal*.  The plant that can provide the food, clothing, shelter, and medicine humans need to survive is illegal.  Nature itself is illegal.  How much more contrary to eternal law and natural law could this unjust prohibition law be?

The fight against cannabis prohibition, against this unjust law, is a civil rights fight.  This declaration will offend some people who will point to four centuries of slavery and Jim Crow, to lynchings and cross burnings, and to beatings and firehoses and condemn my declaration as making light of the plight of those who were truly oppressed.  I do not make light of those struggles, but I also recognize that civil rights are not a zero sum game and the degree and manner in which one is being oppressed are not what make the fight against oppression a just one.  Dr. King dreamed of a day when children would be judged by not by the color of their skin but the content of their character; I dream of a day when workers are judged not by the metabolites in their urine but the quality of their work.

Later in King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he writes:

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. …

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law. …

The unjust law of marijuana prohibition is difference made legal.  The majority compels our minority to forgo our intoxicant, but does not bind itself to forgo their intoxicant.  The majority compels our minority forgo our medicine, but does not bind itself to forgo their medicine.  The majority compels our minority to forgo their religious sacrament, but does not bind itself to forgo their religious sacrament.  The majority compels our minority to forgo our source of food, fuel, and fiber, but does not bind itself to forgo their sources.

The majority may argue that they do not prohibit intoxication, medication, religious sacrament, or food, fuel, and fiber cultivation, so long as it doesn’t involve marijuana.  This to me sounds like the argument against same-sex marriage rights, that gays and lesbians are just as free to marry someone of the opposite sex as everybody else.  If we are given a right, but then proscribed from exercising that right in the manner that benefits us without a valid reason from the majority, it is not really a right.  When intoxication, medication, and sacrament are legal rights, but we are proscribed from using a demonstrably safer intoxicant, medicine, and sacrament, that is difference made legal.

No, we do not face the firehoses and the dogs and the lynchings, nor do we suffer in as great of numbers as did the African Americans Dr. King so graciously led in the years before my birth.  Our oppression is more subtle and codified into laws that restrict our housing, employment, and educational opportunities.  We do not tremble in fear of the midnight ride of white-robed vigilante Klansmen; our terror comes in the form of midnight no-knock raids of body-armored SWAT teams.

Like the civil rights struggles of the past, we work to change laws that oppress people, laws that enjoy support from the majority and are rationalized by tradition, religion, and junk science.  Unlike the civil rights struggles of the past, our constituency is an invisible group defined by lifestyle, not genetics.  That choice to use cannabis should not disqualify our fight to be treated as equals under the law.  After all, the choice to worship the God of your understanding is not genetic, it is a lifestyle choice as well, and our law recognizes that one cannot be discriminated against for that choice.  In fact, it is a bit ironic that one’s choice of God, a belief that cannot be proven by science to beneficial, is a protected right, yet one’s choice of cannabis, a plant that can be proven by science to be beneficial, is a federal crime.

The freedom to worship, of course, is an explicit right recognized by our First Amendment, but its foundation is in the inalienable rights given to us by our Creator, among them being Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness.  If that last one – the Pursuit of Happiness – doesn’t give me the right to smoke a joint so long as I don’t affect anyone else’s Life and Liberty, then the Constitution isn’t worth the hemp paper on which it was drafted.

Also from King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he writes:

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

Today’s freedom fighters are the people like Eddy Lepp and Charles Lynch, providing aid and comfort to the sick and dying by growing and supplying them with medicine, only to face the rest of their natural lives behind bars because what they did was “illegal”.

Today’s “whites-only” establishments are the “drug-free” workplaces keep cannabis users confined to low-paying part-time or temp service jobs, while the rest of the workers are allowed all the alcohol, nicotine, and prescription medications they desire.

Today’s lynchings are the Rachel Hoffmans and Jonathan Magbies who are murdered by police negligence, solely over their use of cannabis.  Today’s institutionalized discrimination is the over 20 million in my lifetime whose lives are marked with the scarlet letter of a drug conviction, affecting their child custody, government assistance, college financial aid, employment opportunities, professional licenses, voting rights, and liberty.

The prohibition of cannabis ultimately degrades human personality and is against moral law.  It is an unjust law that cannot stand, and we have a moral responsibility to disobey it.  In doing so, we express the highest respect for the law.  On this day when we recognize the greatness of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Dream, and on tomorrow, when we see part of that dream fulfilled, remember that we don’t fight to “make pot legal so you can get high”; we fight because the Pursuit of Happiness is our right and caging us for our method of pursuit is unjust.

Smoking pot is our civil right!

Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
Martin Luther King, Jr.

* I recognize that marijuana is legally grown at ElSohly’s lab at the University of Mississippi.  But consider that marijuana’s two purposes – to supply five people grandfathered in to the IND program and to provide marijuana for studies to prove how awful marijuana is to justify its prohibition.  In this metaphor it would be akin to saving a few vials of polio virus so you could use them to make vaccines.

Black girls using marijuana prone to riskier sex, higher STD rate – news.smashits.com
Washington, Aug 6 (ANI): Black girls who use marijuana are more likely to get involved in risky sexual acts and contract sexually transmitted diseases, reveals a new study.

Conducted by Emory University public health researchers, the study analysed the marijuana use and self-reported sexual behaviour of 439 sexually active black females in the age group of 15-21 years.

It was discovered that black girls who used marijuana had significantly higher rates of incident STDs than non-marijuana users (32 percent compared to 23 percent).

In fact, the researchers found that those who used marijuana, also had more sex partners, riskier sex partners, including a partner just released from jail, and more recent episodes of engaging in vaginal sex while their partner was under the influence.

Although no differences in condom use were identified between marijuana users and non-users, results suggest that marijuana users are engaging in sexual acts with riskier partners and under riskier circumstances, and had higher rates of STDs.

The researchers advised STD and HIV intervention programs designed for adolescent black females that not only promote condom use, but also emphasize the risks of drug use and STD and HIV infection.

The study was presented at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City.

Well, once again, we see a report where the lede is based on the idea that using marijuana will cause something bad to happen.  What we may be seeing here is correlation showing that people who like to do risky things may also accept the risk of using a substance that can get you locked up in prison.  For example, the part about “partner just released from jail” could very well be a boyfriend released on marijuana charges.  “[P]artner was under the influence” could very well be a boyfriend who smoked a joint.

Overall, you can’t separate the marijuana use from its prohibition, and its prohibition is more likely the reason behind the different rates in this study.  Using marijuana requires interaction with a criminal underground which by definition is a risky behavior.

Once cannabis is re-legalized, run this study again.  Then we’ll have something to talk about.  In the meantime, find me some STD figures on black girls and alcohol consumption and use that to argue for a return to alcohol prohibition.